Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Tom Hughes]

On 28/01/14 14:42, Matthew Miller wrote:

> * Fedora's drift towards being primarily a desktop OS (with other use areas
>    considered secondarily if at all) ends up practically restricting uses
>    which people really do want Fedora for. That's bad for people who want to
>    use Fedora in innovative ways in server and cloud environments. Even
>    though we have a lot of sysadmin users and there are many examples of real
>    Fedora in production server environments, every time over the past decade
>    that someone has tried to figure out what Fedora Server might actually
>    mean, it's gotten stalled. This has left many sysadmins feeling like
>    either Fedora isn't a place that they can meaningfully contribute, or else
>    that their job is to be the Voice of No. Even when one doesn't want to
>    just be the project's "stop energy", it sometimes felt like there was no
>    other option. Fedora.next should *give* that option for postive
>    contribution.

I think the reason that people have trouble defining what "Fedora 
Server" might mean is that it simply doesn't make a huge amount of sense 
as a thing.

A desktop has some kind of common meaning that everybody can agree on in 
terms of expecting a window manager and certain basic applications but 
everybody will want something different of a server, and indeed will 
want something different on each server.

To me what I would want of "Fedora Server" is simply a solid base OS and 
a solid set of package I can install on top of that depending on what I 
want each particular server to do - sometimes that will be postgres, 
sometimes it will be mysql and apache, sometimes it will be exim and 
spamassassin.

The thing is, for the most part, that is what we already have!

The biggest reason for people preferring, say, Ubuntu over Fedora for 
servers is probably not the existence of something called "server" but 
rather the extended stable lifetime offered by LTS releases.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/